.global a victim of new gTLD launch cluster?

Poor GA-day results from .global are being blamed on registrars being swamped by a cluster of new gTLD launches occurring in close proximity.
Dot Global added 1,074 domains in the first seven hours of .global’s general availability, bringing its zone to 1,637 names in total.
CEO Rolf Larsen told us the number of registrations yesterday was actually closer to 1,200.
The numbers aren’t great for a first day, considering that .global is in place at about 80 registrars, but Larsen said that the lack of a long runway of pre-registrations was to blame.
“We are not unhappy with the 1,200, but unhappy to not have had months of pre-regs to make that number higher,” he said.
“Most registrars don’t even do pre-regs,” he said. “Those who do have had a hard time keeping up with all the launches. Our launch was in a very busy period, so difficult to get on board with all those registrars early. Some, including GoDaddy did pre-regs for us, but over just a few weeks instead of months like with many other launches.”
Go Daddy was the biggest registrar yesterday, he said.
Dot Global has a number of plans to increase its marketing over the coming weeks and months, by itself and in conjunction with its registrar partners.
These plans include broad promotions to registrars’ existing customer bases as well as targeted mailings to companies that already have the word “global” at the second level of their domains.

9 Comments Tagged: .global, dot global, new gTLDs

.london launch day biggest yet for new gTLDs, but did it miss targets?

Dot London Domains’ .london had just shy of 35,000 domains in its zone file this morning, after its first partial day of general availability.
That’s an addition of 12,421 domains over yesterday’s number, making .london the 11th most-registered new gTLD.
This makes .london — which in my opinion has had one of the best launch marketing campaigns we’ve seen this year — the most-successful gTLD, in volume terms, after its first GA day.
It has beaten the 33,012 names that .在线 (“.online” in Chinese) and the 31,645 names that .berlin had in their zone files at the end of their respective GA days.
.london domains are not particularly cheap, either. Minds + Machines sells at £30 ($48) a year and Go Daddy (which lists .london at the top of its UK home page today) sells at $59.99.
UK-based Domainmonster, part of Host Europe Group, performed well with a £34.99 ($56) annual fee.
There were 22,547 .london names claimed during the “London Priority Period”, a combined sunrise/landrush phase that gave first dibs on names to trademark owners followed by London residents.
The registry has not broken down the mix between sunrise and landrush, but I believe based on the paltry sunrise performance of every other new gTLD to date that the vast majority were landrush names.
The full priority period queue has not yet been processed — domains with more than one applicant are currently in auction.
Back-end provider Minds + Machines, recently told the markets that it expects about a quarter of landrush/sunrise names to go to auction, so we could be looking at something like 7,500 applications (as opposed to domains) currently in the auction queue.
What this may mean is that .london had roughly 30,000 applications during its priority period, about 20,000 less than it had predicted back in July.
Dot London Domains is closely affiliated with London & Partners, the PR machine for the Mayor of London, so it had resources and access to throw at an effective marketing campaign.

Comment Tagged: .london, dot london domains, landrush, m+m, Minds + Machines, new gTLDs, sunrise

Donuts beats trademark owner to .coach

Donuts has won the right to the new gTLD .coach, after an exact-match trademark owner withdrew its bid.
Coach Inc is a chain of clothing and accessories outlets, best known for its handbags, founded in New York in 1941.
The company owns coach.com, but withdrew its application for .coach this week, leaving Donuts unchallenged.
Coach had filed a Legal Rights Objection against Donuts, claiming .coach would infringe its trademark, but the objection panelist disagreed (pdf).
The panelist agreed instead with Donuts that “coach” has multiple meanings, and that that was “a risk that the Objector assumed when it adopted as its trademark a common dictionary word.”

2 Comments Tagged: coach, contention, donuts, new gTLDs

Uniregistry beats 1-800-FLOWERS.COM to .flowers

Uniregistry has won the contention set for .flowers, beating three other new gTLD applicants.
The company won the rights to the string after withdrawals from Donuts, Minds + Machines and a subsidiary of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM.
The price of forcing the withdrawals, as usual, has not been disclosed.
Uniregistry currently has 15 delegated new gTLDs and a handful of others, won at auction, that are in the contracting stage of the process.
The string “flowers” has a bit of a tainted history in the domain name space.
Investor Rick Schwartz famously paid $200,000 for flowers.mobi, only to sell it on a few years later to another investor for $6,500.
That domainer flipped it in 2012, and it ultimately wound up in the hands of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM for an undisclosed sum.

Comment Tagged: .flowers, auctions, new gTLDs, uniregistry

Russian hackers breaking in to NameCheap accounts

If you have an account at NameCheap, now might be a good time to think about changing your password.
According to the registrar, hackers based in Russia are using a haul of a reported 4.5 billion username/password combinations to attempt to break into its customers’ accounts.
Some attempts have been successful, NameCheap warned.
The attackers are using credentials stolen from third-party sources in a large-scale, automated attempt to log in to user accounts, disguised as regular users, the company said in a blog post.
NameCheap said:

The vast majority of these login attempts have been unsuccessful as the data is incorrect or old and passwords have been changed. As a precaution, we are aggressively blocking the IP addresses that appear to be logging in with the stolen password data. We are also logging these IP addresses and will be exporting blocking rules across our network to completely eliminate access to any Namecheap system or service, as well as making this data available to law enforcement.
While the vast majority of these logins are unsuccessful, some have been successful. To combat this, we’ve temporarily secured the Namecheap accounts that have been affected and are currently contacting customers involved requesting they improve the security for these accounts.

Affected users have been emailed, the company said.
NameCheap suspects the attack is linked to a reported cache of 1.2 billion unique username/password combinations amassed by a hacker group from databases vulnerable to SQL injection.
The registrar pointed out that its own systems haven’t been hacked. Customers should only be vulnerable if they use the same username and password at NameCheap as they use on other sites.

Comment Tagged: hacking, namecheap, security

.club first new gTLD to sell 100,000 domains

.club hit a landmark this week with its 100,000th domain name registration, according to .CLUB Domains.
It’s the first new gTLD to get to this level of success without giving away names for free — .xyz and .berlin have over 460,000 and 130,000 names respectively but fall under 100k if you factor out the freebies.
The .club zone file showed 98,984 names (excluding swelling from the name collisions program) last night, and it’s been growing at steady rate of roughly 250-300 names per day.
It appears that there are 1,000 or so names that do not appear in the zone file, perhaps because they’re not configured yet.
.club hit general availability May 7, 114 days ago.

Comment Tagged: .club, .club domains, new gTLDs

ICANN terminates billion-dollar gTLD applicant over unpaid $3,000 bill

Telefonica Brasil, part of the massive Telefonica group of telecoms companies, has lost its registrar accreditation after failing to pay its ICANN fees.
The company, which had revenue last year of $14.6 billion, is facing termination of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement over the pitiful sum of $3,082.12.
It’s also embarrassing because Telefonica is applying for the new gTLD .vivo, its consumer brand in Brasil, which will require it to sign a Registry Agreement with ICANN.
I don’t think the loss of the RAA affects the company’s ability to get its gTLD contracted and delegated.
According to ICANN (pdf), Telefonica also failed to comply with the Registrar Information Specification, a pretty basic rule in the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement requiring registrars to provide their address and names of officers and any parent companies.
The company has no gTLD names under management, so registrants will not be affected by the termination, which will take effect September 25.
ICANN sent its initial breach notice in July, but Telefonica did not comply before the August deadline. It also received a breach notice over an unpaid $10,000 bill a year ago.

Comment Tagged: .vivo, 2013 raa, compliance, ICANN, new gTLDs, telefonica

GAC kills .indians and two more dot-brands die

Reliance Industries, owner of the Mumbai Indians cricket team, has withdrawn its application for the new gTLD .indians after an objection from the Indian government.
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee has said in formal advice several times, most recently in March, that India was not cool with the idea of a .indians TLD, but noted that the country stood alone.
Following the Singapore meeting this year, the GAC said: “the Government of India has requested that the application for .indians not proceed.”
As a piece of non-consensus advice, ICANN would have been able to more easily reject India’s objection, but the withdrawal means it will not have to make that decision.
India has a similarly dim view of .ram, which Chrysler has applied for to protect a car brand but which also matches an important deity in the Hindu pantheon. That bid is still active.
But recently we’ve seen two other dot-brand applicants get out of the new gTLD program.
Dun & Bradstreet has just withdrawn its bid for .dnb. Last week, Myriad International Holdings yanked its application for .mih.

1 Comment Tagged: .dnb, .indians, .mih, .ram, ICANN, new gTLDs, withdrawals

After $1bn deal, Amazon registers Twitch domains in three gTLDs. Can you guess which three?

Amazon has paid almost a billion dollars for the gaming community Twitch and immediately set about defensively registering some domain names.
amazontwitch.com, amazontwitch.net, and amazontwitch.org were all registered via MarkMonitor on Monday, coinciding with the announcement of the acquisition.
The company even registered twitchamazon.com, but not the corresponding .net and .org.
But Amazon, a major new gTLD applicant itself, does not appear to have registered the string in any new gTLDs, despite being one of the most prolific defensive registrants.
The company owns the string “fire” in scores of new gTLDs and appears to have blanket-registered “prime” and “kindle” in pretty much every new gTLD sunrise to date.
Twitch, pre-acquisition, doesn’t seem to have involved itself in new gTLDs at all, though the string “twitch” has been registered in several.
Bad news for the owners of these domains?

Comment Tagged: amazon, twitch

Radix’s first gTLD landrushes only risk-free if you shop around

Radix Registry has gone into landrush with its first new gTLDs, promising a “risk-free” experience for buyers who want to get into .website, .press and .host early.
But different registrars are handling the phase in different ways — with a staggering range of prices — so you could still lose money on domains you don’t get unless you shop around.
Business head Sandeep Ramchandani confirmed that while Radix does not have any nonrefundable components at the registry end, it’s up to the individual registrars to decide whether to follow suit.
Radix has set up a microsite to help would-be registrants compare prices and find a registrar with a refundable fee.
It’s a useful tool, because prices vary wildly by registrar.
For .website, the lowest-cost of the three gTLDs, you’ll probably want to avoid Go Daddy. Its “priority pre-registration” service costs a whopping $174.98 for a bog-standard domain, compared to landrush fees around the $40 mark at all the other listed registrars.
General availability pricing for .website appears to be in line with .com, with Name.com and Go Daddy both listing GA domains at $14.99.
.press and .host, which cater to rather more niche markets, have correspondingly higher base pricing. Both will hit GA with pricing ranging from $100 to $130, it seems.
To apply for names in either during landrush you can expect to pay between $250 and $360, depending on registrar.
You’re also going to have a harder time finding a registrar that will refund landrush fees in .press and .host; Radix currently lists four registrars doing this for .press and only two for .host.
For premium names, Radix is going the now fairly industry standard route of charging premium fees on renewals as well as the initial registration.
investing.website will set you back $3,125 a year at Name.com, for example, while whiskey.website will cost $312.50 a year.
Go Daddy is not yet carrying Radix premium names.
Some names have five-figure renewal fees attached, Ramchandani said.
But he added that Radix has only set aside “a few hundred” premium names in each of the three TLDs, a much lower number than most previous new gTLD launches.
The idea is to get domains out there and in the hands of users, he said.
The new microsite also carries a few downloadable spreadsheets of supposedly attractive names that are available at the basic, non-premium registration fee.
Seasoned domain investors might find some bargains there (assuming they don’t go to landrush auction), but there are also some oddities.
Is wellnessfinder.website worthy of a recommendation, just because the domain+website wellnessfinder.com sold for €300,000 in 2011?
And to what possible use could you put a vagina.press? I shudder to think…

Comment Tagged: .host, .press, .website, landrush, new gTLDs, radix